It was also around this time I started noticing Cassian differently.
Not all at once. Just — incrementally. In the way you don’t realize something is happening until it already has.
He was taller. Broader in the shoulders, like he’d grown into himself while I wasn’t paying attention. His hair was longer, that honey blonde I’d always known gone a little more disheveled, like he’d stopped trying to manage it and it suited him better that way—all messy.
I’d catch myself looking.
A second too long.
My eyes lingering on the strip of skin that showed when he’d stretch out across my bed, shirt riding up, completely unbothered. And I’d look away fast. Pick up my phone or my book or stare at the ceiling.
I was starting to understand something about myself.
I just wasn’t ready to name it yet.
• • •
He got a nose piercing around this time.
Did it himself.
I know because I was there — he showed up at my window one afternoon with a needle and asked me to hold the mirror.
I said yes immediately.
Of course I did. I’d do anything for him.
I watched his face in the reflection as he lined it up. Calm. Focused. No hesitation.
I closed my eyes right before he did it.
He laughed at me for that.
In my defense, I was holding a mirror two inches from his face while he stabbed himself with a sewing needle. Some of us have limits.
He flipped it inside his nose when my parents were around. Or his dad. It was our quiet secret — this small rebellion he carried hidden in plain sight.
Cassian was brave in a way I never felt like I was.
But with him, I felt it too.
Like bravery was something you could borrow if you stood close enough to someone who had it.
• • •
We talked about girls sometimes.
Mostly him talking, me nodding along. Pretending I understood what he meant. Pretending I felt it the same way.
I didn’t.
I probably never had.
But Cassian was struggling and the world next door was getting quieter and colder, and whatever I was figuring out about myself felt small and selfish by comparison.
So I folded it up.
Put it away.
